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Comment by idank | Hacker News Reader

Truly amazing. What's even more amazing is how ancient the technology inside one of mankind's most incredible inventions looks compared to what we know today.

It reminds me of a visit to one of Israel's Air Force bases where I got to see the F-16's up close. I couldn't believe it when we were told that pilots upon receiving coordinates, had to open up a notebook beside them and actually look it up to know where to go because their navigation system was so old. The F-16I had a lot of improvements in this area that no longer required manual lookup by the pilot.

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I'd like to note that the shuttle fleet received a "glass cockpit" upgrade (around 1997-1998), replacing many mechanical indicators with multi-function displays. Here's a link to a (small) side-by-side comparison:

http://human-factors.arc.nasa.gov/ihi/research_groups/isis/M...

Prior to the upgrade, the space shuttle looked dated compared to commercial airliners flying at the time. It's debatable whether the shuttles looked more ancient then or now.

Couple of years ago flew on an MD-80/DC-10 that had what looked like the original 1970's-era instrumentation. It did look pretty ancient. Wonder how many pilots are even qualified to fly on that, or if the qualifications are different.

The same plane was leaking fuel out of the wing throughout the flight. Not really confidence-inspiring.

Almost all pilots today still learn to fly on the old "steam" gauges, not on glass, and many glass cockpits still have the basic analog gauges as a backup.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_instruments#Basic_Six

There's a few parts of that anecdote which confuse me as a pilot. The first one is two vastly different aircraft separated by a slash as if to indicate that they are equivalent. The second is an air crew that completed a flight, while leaking fuel, without declaring emergency and putting it down. Lastly, someone actually observing fuel leaking from the aircraft and thinking "meh, it's just old," rather than alerting the air crew.

(Put another way, I have doubts that you were observing a fuel leak. Those are generally pretty easy to notice -- "why are we consuming two thousand extra pounds of fuel per hour?")

Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story, unless you can't think of anything better.

Re: how old the tech is - about ten years ago NASA was buying old computing equipment in bulk to scavenge the 8086 chips, which were used for shuttle support gear:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/12/us/for-parts-nasa-boldly-g...

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